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ABSOLUTE PHILOSOPHICAL RELATIVISM IS AN OXYMORON
John Howard Yoder, unpublished, 1993. Drafted in June 1993 after the paper "Meaning After Babble: With Jeffery Stout Beyond Relativism" (Journal of Religious Ethics 24 [Spring 1996], 125-39).
To make an issue of foundationalism is a form of foundationalism; This becomes evident in the ways in which S. Hauerwas is understood when he refuses to dialogue on foundational grounds.
Relative relativism/pluralism (as I said already in "But We See Jesus"(1)) is a product of monotheistic and messianic relativizing of Caesar and of the ethnos. For other people, for constantinians, to relativize or to admit diversity may be a dilution of one's control claims, and thereby by implication a dilution of one's truth claims, or a loss of character(2) but not for us. That's the point of the subtitle "this land is our land" in the chapter cited above.
Relative pluralism is the least evil way to relate clashing value communities, as democracy is the least evil form of government. No real world process is not a power game, but a "liberal" game played by the rules is better (less evil) than any other form of power game.
The absolute relativism of the politically correct, when based in a particular (subcultural) denial of the availability of any common norms, is a foundationalism turned in on itself (or what I call "methodologism" in my text in the Beatty book(3)). Habermas is right that the history won't stand still, Ricoeur (like Fish, Tracy) is right in holding that the text is not simply objectively there, since every reader is somewhere else. Yet to extrapolate from this relative relativity to an absolute unaccountable nihilism about verifiable meanings is cheating, pulls the rug out from under its own argument.
When Stout takes the fact of the community-dependency of value systems and makes it "The Problem", calling it "Babel", he plays along with this foundationalism. Similarly when SH uses "everyone is community-dependent" to dodge challenges from beyond his own circle.
When you and I read a text together ("you" being any important "Other" who is open to sharing with me in any reading), it is (i.e. the text is, and the process is) in a real sense objective or trans-subjective. Neither of us can shrug off the other's reading of it as long as the appeal is to the text. Relative relativism is unavoidable since we come to the text from different places, but profound

ABSOLUTE PHILOSOPHICAL RELATIVISM IS AN OXYMORON
John Howard Yoder, unpublished, 1993. Drafted in June 1993 after the paper "Meaning After Babble: With Jeffery Stout Beyond Relativism" (Journal of Religious Ethics 24 [Spring 1996], 125-39).
To make an issue of foundationalism is a form of foundationalism; This becomes evident in the ways in which S. Hauerwas is understood when he refuses to dialogue on foundational grounds.
Relative relativism/pluralism (as I said already in "But We See Jesus"(1)) is a product of monotheistic and messianic relativizing of Caesar and of the ethnos. For other people, for constantinians, to relativize or to admit diversity may be a dilution of one's control claims, and thereby by implication a dilution of one's truth claims, or a loss of character(2) but not for us. That's the point of the subtitle "this land is our land" in the chapter cited above.
Relative pluralism is the least evil way to relate clashing value communities, as democracy is the least evil form of government. No real world process is not a power game, but a "liberal" game played by the rules is better (less evil) than any other form of power game.
The absolute relativism of the politically correct, when based in a particular (subcultural) denial of the availability of any common norms, is a foundationalism turned in on itself (or what I call "methodologism" in my text in the Beatty book(3)). Habermas is right that the history won't stand still, Ricoeur (like Fish, Tracy) is right in holding that the text is not simply objectively there, since every reader is somewhere else. Yet to extrapolate from this relative relativity to an absolute unaccountable nihilism about verifiable meanings is cheating, pulls the rug out from under its own argument.
When Stout takes the fact of the community-dependency of value systems and makes it "The Problem", calling it "Babel", he plays along with this foundationalism. Similarly when SH uses "everyone is community-dependent" to dodge challenges from beyond his own circle.
When you and I read a text together ("you" being any important "Other" who is open to sharing with me in any reading), it is (i.e. the text is, and the process is) in a real sense objective or trans-subjective. Neither of us can shrug off the other's reading of it as long as the appeal is to the text. Relative relativism is unavoidable since we come to the text from different places, but profound